by Tim Elfrink
Was he ever. In the bottom of the fourth, he came up again with two runners on. Cabrera worked the count to 2-2, then ripped a high, inside fastball over the left-field wall for a laser-beam, three-run bomb.
By the end of the game, the National League had creamed the junior circuit 8–0, and Cabrera was trotted out to center field with his crying mom and grandmother. The outfielder grinned as Selig handed him a crystal bat and the keys to a 2013 Chevy Camaro. Melky Cabrera, two years removed from a four-homer, .255 year with the Braves, was the reigning All-Star Game MVP.
(His only real competition on the night was Milwaukee Brewers outfielder Ryan Braun, who’d contributed an RBI double, a triple, and an incredible catch on a Prince Fielder line drive.)
“I didn’t come to win an MVP,” Cabrera told reporters in halting English. “That’s just a surprise. It’s a great gift the Lord gave me.”
The Lord giveth and the baseball gods taketh away. Cabrera’s joy lasted only a few days. Then he learned the news: He’d failed a drug test for synthetic testosterone. He was in line for a fifty-game ban.
Cabrera was frantic. He called the one man he thought could help: Juan Carlos Nunez.
• • •
The trio of Dominican Republic–based websites were all plastered with the same bright banner ad, which crisscrossed listings for nutritional supplements, herbal remedies, and protein powders. They were disarmingly basic, showing a jar full of a mysterious substance and a phone number with a DR country code.
Mullin’s team had no choice but to follow the ads down the rabbit hole. Melky Cabrera was the first big-name player nabbed by his testers since the Ryan Braun fiasco, and they’d be damned if Cabrera found a way to wriggle out of his suspension too. Losing two high-profile suspensions in less than a year might just be a death knell for baseball’s drug police.
Cabrera had filed an appeal to his positive test through the Players Association, seeking cover under a clause in the suspension policy that cut a player slack if he’d unwittingly taken something that caused his testosterone spike. He’d told baseball officials that that’s what had happened: He’d ordered a substance advertised on these banners, not knowing what precisely was inside, and had been burned by the medicine.
If the DOI wanted this suspension to stick, they’d have to get to the bottom of the mystery substance.
It wasn’t just the Braun fiasco that made Mullin’s team so eager. His drug testers believed that Melky’s failed test was the clearest sign yet that science was finally catching up to the cheaters.
Testers and cheaters alike knew about the weaknesses of the 4:1 ratio test. By allowing for a natural variation, there’s a window for a smart doper like Tony Bosch to make a difference. By giving his clients fast-acting testosterone lozenges and carefully timed creams, his athletes could massage their ratios to stay just below the cutoffs.
“This is the single biggest loophole in Major League Baseball,” Victor Conte later said.
But MLB’s testing lab in Montreal had quietly started using carbon isotope testing even in cases where athletes had passed their ratio tests. The process is expensive (about $400 a pop), but it finds what ratios miss: traces of the unique isotopes synthetic testosterones leave in the body, even if users keep their ratios below 4:1.
“Athletes who are sophisticated can keep their ratios below four-to-one and still use levels of synthetic testosterone,” says Travis Tygart, the director of the US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA). “You need to be able to go directly to that [carbon isotope] test, not rely just on elevated testosterone ratios.”
Now, just a few months into the new season, they’d already netted a big fish who may have evaded detection in past seasons. Assuming he hadn’t taken it by accident, that is.
Mullin’s Spanish-language investigators started probing Cabrera’s excuse by calling the number listed on sites. A seller told them they’d have to travel to Santo Domingo to get his product. So DOI investigators made the trip, buying a jar of the mystery medicine and sending it back to the World Anti-Doping Agency’s (WADA) Olympic testing lab in California.
Meanwhile, back in New York, analysts took a closer look at the sites themselves. As they called owners and looked at cached pages, they soon noticed a curious pattern. The banner ads all seemed to have appeared out of nowhere—days after Cabrera had learned of his positive tests. Finally, the team learned the truth from one of the domains’ former owners: They’d sold the entire site days earlier. To a man named Juan Carlos Nunez.
From there, the scheme dreamed up by the former Washington Heights travel agent and ACES “consultant” quickly unraveled. Tests from WADA came back that whatever they’d bought in the DR had tested positive for high levels of testosterone, but Mullin’s team believed the truth was murkier than steroid-tainted medicine. When investigators confronted Nunez and Cabrera with the evidence, their elaborate ruse collapsed. The Dominican consultant confessed to his plot: buying three sites for $10,000, planting the fake ad, and even getting a confederate on the ground in Santo Domingo to sell testosterone-infused cream.
On August 15, the Giants outfielder—then leading the league with 159 hits—was suspended for fifty games. He’d miss the rest of the Giants push for a playoff spot and at least the first five games of their postseason if they could make it.
Cabrera didn’t mention his website ploy in his contrite statement. “My positive test was the result of my use of a substance I should not have used,” Cabrera admitted to reporters, while apologizing to fans and teammates. “I will try to move on with my life.”
But five years after the Mitchell Report, the case was the DOI’s first real victory in its covert war on steroids. For the first time since the Mitchell Report, a steroid scandal had erupted, a player had tried to deceive them, and they’d ground their way down to the truth.
But questions remained. If Cabrera hadn’t accidentally bought tainted drugs from the DR, where had his PEDs come from?
• • •
Just a week after Cabrera’s suspension went public, the question became even more pressing. That’s when another starter on a contending team in the Bay Area got the dreaded call from his union reps.
This time, it was Bartolo Colon. Aside from their shared Dominican heritage, Colon and Cabrera could hardly have been more different. Colon had proved his worth in the bigs time and again since coming up in 1997, winning an ALCS game for the Indians, throwing a one-hitter against the Yankees, and even nabbing the American League Cy Young in 2005 while pitching for the Angels. In 2012, he was in the winter of his remarkable career, two years into a surprising comeback after an experimental surgery that implanted stem cells directly into a damaged throwing shoulder. Colon was thirty-nine years old now, chunky and strikingly unathletic, but still pitching well for the surprising Oakland A’s. By midsummer, he’d posted a 10-9 record with a 3.43 ERA.
Now, like Cabrera, he was out for fifty games thanks to a testosterone violation. He didn’t fight the punishment, apologizing and saying, “I accept responsibility for my actions.”
Even without two of their stars, both the A’s and the Giants found themselves playing baseball late into October. The Giants could have brought Cabrera back for the NLCS against the Cardinals, his fifty-game penance having been served. But manager Bruce Bochy didn’t add the All-Star MVP to his roster. The message seemed clear: We can win without a cheater.
And win they did. Cabrera watched at home as his team came back from a 3–1 series deficit to stun the Cardinals, and then swept the Tigers to take a World Series crown.
The season was over, but Selig’s drug police weren’t finished yet. On November 7, they announced yet another fifty-game ban, yet again for failing a testosterone test. This time the culprit was a twenty-three-year-old Cuban-born catcher named Yasmani Grandal.
The former UM star had earned a June call-up to the Padres and quickly set an offensive record. In his first major league start on June 30, Grandal homered from both sides of the plat
e—the first man in the history of the game to record his first two career hits that way. He finished the year strong, batting .297 with eight homers in split action behind the plate, projecting as a middle-of-the-order bat with above-average defensive tools.
But now, his sophomore season would start at home. He’d miss the first fifty games of the year under the ban.
The suspensions, to MLB’s testers, were proof that their new policies were working—four legit big league players in one calendar year had been caught doping with synthetic testosterone. That’s almost as many as they’d caught in the previous four seasons combined since the Mitchell Report.
But was there a pattern behind the positives? The DOI detectives started to think like epidemiologists, parsing whether this was an outbreak stemming from a single source, or if the failed tests were just a coincidence. In a flash of avian flu or Legionnaires’ disease, the CDC starts by looking for commonalities: Did the victims stay in the same place, eat the same food, or share the same flight?
Mullin’s team started trying to make the same kinds of connections to find the ties between Braun, Cabrera, Grandal, and Colon. It didn’t take long to see that Miami was a nexus point. Braun and Grandal had both starred at the University of Miami, and Cabrera made his off-season home in the Magic City.
The DOI soon began taking a second look at the doctor’s son in Miami who had been embroiled in Manny Ramirez’s case three years earlier.
“The focus of our interest in Bosch and South Florida picked up in the summer of 2012,” Rob Manfred later testified in Alex Rodriguez’s arbitration hearing. “We began to realize that there were players who had connections, agents who were connected to those players, trainers who were connected to those players, businesses that were related to Bosch and others that we suspected were involved in the provision of performance-enhancing drugs.”
But even with the mounting suspicion, it took a completely unexpected break to unravel Tony Bosch’s empire.
CHAPTER TWELVE
* * *
The Beginning of the End
Tony Bosch’s hand shook as he scrawled a plea into his notebook. His normally steady writing bled straight through onto the next page.
The self-proclaimed doctor was confused and angry. Hadn’t he told Melky Cabrera exactly how many testosterone troches he could take without getting caught? Hadn’t all of his clients been warned to be more careful after the barely averted piss-test disaster with Braun?
Yet weeks after one of Bosch’s greatest triumphs—watching one of his own customers hoist an All-Star MVP trophy on national television—everything was suddenly going to pieces.
Juan Carlos Nunez, the surreptitious ACES employee and Bosch’s connection to Melky and other major leaguers, wasn’t even returning his calls. Worse, Melky hadn’t paid him for his last shipment of “food,” the transparent shorthand Bosch used for PEDs in his notes.
There was still hope. Melky’s suspension hadn’t been made public yet as the Giants star filed an appeal. Bosch was aware of a ballsy scheme Nunez and the outfielder had cooked up to evade punishment.
It seemed like a perfect plan to Bosch. They had bought an unused Dominican website and changed it to make it look like the site was selling tainted nutritional creams. They would then claim that it had sold Melky the substance that caused him to fail a drug test.
Melky’s crime, the story would be, was a simple mistake made while web-surfing.
Hell, if Ryan Braun could evade a stone-cold failed test—where his testosterone to epitestosterone was an off-the-charts 20:1 catastrophe—by claiming that his sample was mishandled by an “anti-Semitic” urine tester, anything was possible.
He started the letter snarkily. “Dear Juan,” he wrote. “Congrats on the MVP Award! This smells like the ‘Braun’ advantage.”
Bosch referred to the website scheme as a James Bond plot of intrigue, which may have been giving it too much credit. “The ‘J. Bond Story’ and the food adjustments I made, along with the right representation [and a fall guy], might be able to pull this off! I’m feeling it more and more and so are some industry experts.”
Then Bosch started to unload. The slick clinic owner rarely picked a fight. His friends knew he was allergic to confrontation. One acquaintance recalled meeting him at the Ritz-Carlton Key Biscayne for a drink. They’d just sat down when Tony spotted someone coming through the door to whom he owed money. Without a word, he’d set down his drink and quietly slipped out the back.
“He doesn’t like arguments,” says Roger De Armas, his childhood friend. “He’ll walk away and leave rather than continue. Then he’ll see you next time and buy you a drink.”
This time, Tony Bosch wasn’t walking away and he wasn’t buying anyone a drink. “I believe that during this self-inflicted fiasco, Mostro has received his salary,” Bosch wrote, “and you have been compensated by your employer. However, I have not received payment of any form.”
Bosch was used to being on the other end of this letter, the guy perpetually running from debts. “I know this is an alarming issue and detrimental to many careers including my own. However, life goes on, and bills have to be paid,” he continued. “I have invested in your players and leveraged my profits in order to accommodate your requests, specifically regarding ‘DR’ and ‘My Son.’”
In Bosch’s mind, he had bent over backward to help out Nunez and his clients, particularly Cesar Puello—whom he’d nicknamed “Mi Hijo,” or “My Son”—and fifteen-year-old Ricardo Cespedes, “DR”—Mets prospects who couldn’t afford Bosch’s major league rate but whom he had added to the Biogenesis roster anyway. Now Nunez was screwing him over. Bosch took a deep breath and put the marker back to the paper.
“This risk has been compounded by Mostro’s inconsistent behavior and idle threats, not to mention his lack of irresponsibility [sic] that has led to this ‘pressure cooker situation’ that we are all experiencing,” he dashed off. “Tell your boy to man up and act accordingly.”
Nunez had work to do, too. “Furthermore, I would like to send all the food out immediately to you so you may distribute it. And I would like for you to collect payment, set aside your fees, and deposit the remaining balance into my account. This includes Mostro’s $9,000 and my $5,000 All-Star bonus that he so vigorously promised.”
Nunez and Melky were desperate? Well, so was Bosch! They weren’t the only ones sticking their necks out. “I am on the line here! This guy’s blunder has me infuriated, along with his stupid ‘idle’ threat. I am out thousands of dollars because I bought all this month’s food. In my helping him, I put all my [doctors] at risk by fabricating patient charts and phony prescriptions. I did it because you promised me compensation and I trust you.”
Getting stiffed $14,000 wasn’t even the worst of it. The failed test—the “blunder” he was certain was all Melky’s fault by not following his instructions on how much testosterone to take and when to take it—was imperiling the most valuable relationship Bosch had ever cultivated.
Melky’s failed test could jeopardize Alex Rodriguez’s faith in the Biogenesis regimen.
“This also has put my relationship with ‘Cacique’ at risk at the tune of $12,000 per month,” Bosch wrote, using his nickname for the Yankees star. “And I have four years remaining on that deal. And to top it off, I’m upside down on ‘DR’ and ‘My Son’!
“I demand immediate payment,” Bosch finished. “Thank you for your immediate attention to this matter.”
Everything was close to collapsing, but if Mostro could just hang on—just fight through it the way Braun had—everything might just work out. Bosch would get paid, his next generation of clients would inch their way to the bigs, and most important, A-Rod would stay on board. It wasn’t impossible.
Bosch’s handwritten regimen for Melky Cabrera, using his nickname “Mostro”
But in the meantime, Bosch had a cash-flow problem.
Without his big leaguers, Biogenesis just didn’t pay the bills. Consider his
July 2012 financial books, the month before the Melky fiasco. Bosch recorded only his ordinary Miami clients on the official books—and the picture wasn’t pretty. He’d collected $24,355 from 119 active customers, including the Collazo clan and Elie “Booba” Yaffa.
The same group owed $35,180, so his collection services weren’t the best. But the real problem was his expenses: Between weekly payments to his ex-wives, staff pay, rent, and mounting costs for his meds (including a nearly $4,000 debt to Oggi), he owed $32,334 for July.
That didn’t include off-the-books expenses. Bosch liked to let off steam by popping bottles at South Beach nightclubs, and there is evidence that he enjoyed the harder, more expensive stuff as well. A friend named Robert Davis Miller later cashed in on his purported knowledge of Bosch’s love of Miami’s most famous imported product.
Ten years younger than Bosch, Miller was the quintessential cocaine buddy. His criminal career had started when he was just fourteen, bouncing in and out of juvenile detention eleven times on charges including criminal mischief and auto theft. Four years later, he was arrested for fighting his football coach at Sunset High and then threatening to “fuck up” the opposing team’s coach. After high school, he started breaking into neighborhood houses and strolling out with thousands of dollars in jewelry. In 1995, he was caught with a gun while out on probation and sent to federal prison.
According to a sworn affidavit Miller later provided to Alex Rodriguez, he and Bosch bonded over a love of cocaine. The ex-con claims that he saw Bosch use cocaine “almost daily,” and provided photos of the two hanging out with Baggies of white powder on a coffee table. “He had a reputation for heavy partying and drug use,” Lorraine Delgadillo, a former Biogenesis nurse, wrote in a similar affidavit about her one-time boss. Bosch later pled the Fifth when A-Rod’s attorneys pushed him on the question of his coke addiction.
